Re: Re: Lesson 8

#19409
Duncan Rawlinson
Keymaster

Wow!

Great work with this assignment. I’m really happy to see you pushing the story telling element of the craft and incorporating the technical elements learnt so far. The result is a very impressive photograph. Congratulations.

I really love this photograph and I’m proud to see you push yourself this far. That being said I want you to walk away from this photograph with a few new ideas so I’m going to focus on where I see room for improvement. Please don’t take it as an insult about image. The image is great and the issues I will bring up are small, but important things to consider.

1. Always be careful for latitude limitations. You have a “burnt out” (also called blown out) area in the wing on the right of the body. This digital information is lost. It can’t be recovered. Your camera couldn’t pick up the details in this tonal spectrum so it overexposed it to compensate for the rest of the image. However, my guess is this could have been avoided by changing positioning or lighting. Sometimes burning out a part of an image is unavoidable (ie. If your camera shoots the sun, an exposed bulb, outside a window when shooting indoors). However, you should try to avoid it when possible.

Please read the following blog post on latitude and dynamic range on our photography blog:

http://photographyicon.com/blog/2008/11/26/digital-cameras-latitude-dynamic-range/

2. I really like the hair and exposed nature of the subject. However, it’s a very dark and mysterious image and I don’t feel the top of the pants communicate the same “tone”. I like how you included the top of the pants, but I would have liked to see something more dreamlike. This is after all a very dreamlike photograph. What about a textured skirt (even a tou tou)? What about a draped piece of fabric. What about dirt? What about a very saturated skirt? If you’re ever staging a photograph both makeup and wardrobe are incredibly important. I think you would have benefited by experimenting with wardrobe more in this image.

Other than that, I really love this composition. Great use of lines (i.e. arms), limited color palette and texture in the background (especially in the second image). Again, congratulations!